2. The Deprived Child
As Christmas drew near in 1946, little Robert Hicks was getting very excited at hearing all that would take place in the children's home. The other children told him about the food and presents and the wonderful time that lay ahead. Growing up in the slums of Birmingham, hot food and plenty of it was already a new experience for him.
Robert's home was a house of horrors. His mother and father were both unfaithful to each other and his father, a heavy drinker, regularly beat the children, often dragging them from their beds in the dead of night to do so. Even when the council rehoused the family in newly built council homes on the edge of the city, things didn't change. The only positive thing about the move was that Robert and his siblings could escape to the surrounding fields and woodlands to play, avoiding entering the house they dreaded until they really had to.
Robert never knew what it was to be kissed or cuddled by his mother, which is what made the warmth of the embrace of the kind and gentle motherly worker in the home such a treasured memory. This would have been the first Christmas where he would have felt safe and happy, but it was not to be. With just a few days to go, his mother arrived and took him 'home.'
He later found out that the only reason that she came and deprived him of that lovely Christmas was so that she and dad could have the benefits that had been redirected to the home to spend on themselves. The children were regularly locked in the house while their parents went to the pub or cinema. Whilst the parents were well dressed, the children depended on second-hand clothing from the NSPCC, which Robert remembers were always too big for him. “You'll grow into them,” was the response if he remarked on the fact. By the time his shoes fitted the soles were worn through and he needed cardboard in them.
School was difficult too. Robert and his siblings stood out from the rest of the children because of their ragged clothes and unkempt, neglected appearance, as well as the stigma of having to have free school lunches. Often these were the only meals they had, which added to their dread of weekends. In addition, Robert was born with his tongue tied to the bottom of his mouth. He found it hard to make himself understood. With that and his undiagnosed dyslexia he left school unable to read or write. He remembers frequently being humiliated and treated as an idiot and how, on leaving school, his headmaster presented him with his leaving certificate and the words, “Waste!” It was something he never forgot.
He got himself a job as an errand boy for a grocer and a former nurse working at the shop one day asked Robert if she could look inside his mouth. Following a simple procedure, which he could have had years earlier, had his parents been bothered, he learned to speak normally. Following his operation the surgeon asked him to read a passage from a book. Discovering that he couldn't, but that he longed to read and write like other people, the surgeon suggested that he find a book and copy it out. The only book he could find in the house was an unread King James Bible which he copied out and read aloud to his speech therapist over the next three years. It transformed his life, for he not only learnt to read but discovered a God who loved him and a Saviour who died for him.
Robert went on to be a successful business man in the retail trade introducing many innovations that are taken for granted in supermarkets today. Moving into Christian bookselling and publishing with his radical marketing ideas, he eventually formed his own publishing company, Creative Publishing. He instigated the mass distribution of gospels at the time of the Millennium; was a leading figure in organising Back to Church Sunday and, in 2011, the 400th anniversary year of the King James translation, he went to Buckingham Palace and presented the Queen with a new edition of what he had written out word for word 45 years earlier.
No one could have imagined how Robert's life could ever be redeemed, but as the angel told the virgin Mary, “Nothing is impossible with God,” Luke 1:37.
Major Howard Webber (retired)
Salvation Army Officer
UK
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